The Week That Changed How I Lead

**Mickey Anderson** (0:00)
I was at my local CrossFit gym doing legless rope climbs. I jumped down and landed on the rope and heard a snap. Thankfully, I was working out with two amazing paramedics who helped me get onto the couch, gave me some ibuprofen.
And then once the nausea and the pain subsided a little bit, they helped hurl me into my truck, and I drove home, hobbled into the house and collapsed on the couch. Where I managed to get out, I broke my ankle to my husband, and then his phone rang.
About three minutes later, he said that he had to leave for work immediately. He was being deployed for three to four months, and I begged him to run to the store and grab me some crutches, which he did, and then came home, packed a bag, and left. I drove myself to the hospital for x-rays, and then came home to an empty house and a new puppy. Our house is on the market for sale. We had showings every weekend. I was leading the operations full time at a fitness company, and my partner, who was carrying half of the logistical load of everything in my life, just up and left for three months. I had a boot on my leg for six weeks. That week made me a different kind of leader.
This episode is about what I did inside that week, what it taught me about how I had been operating, and what I'm building today because of it.
Let's dig in. I had a choice. I could push through and try to carry everything myself, or I could stop, ask the team to carry what they could, and learn how to lead from the side of the room that I had never sat in before. I picked the second option. Here's what I actually did, the seven steps I took and why each one mattered. So the seven things that I did after coming back with a boot on my foot and trying to figure out how to get our team to support me and to keep things moving when I had been doing a lot, a lot, a lot like most leaders do. The first thing I did was call a team meeting. I brought everyone together and laid out what had happened, broken my foot, and I wasn't going to be able to do it all. And this was an opportunity for us to come together, support me and support one another just like we do all the time, but also an opportunity for us to fix up some of the operations and the workloads that needed some addressing and help us all just be better people and better leaders and better team members. Number two was workload reviews. I took a look at every single individual on the team, including me, what they were doing, what their capacity looked like, the tasks they had on their plate, their priorities, and what I knew about their lives and the things they were balancing. This gave me a really clear picture of the whole team, the strengths, weaknesses, areas of opportunity, and where there might be some leverage or some shifting we could do to reprioritize things so that we could work together and we could get through these next six weeks. The next thing I did was hold one-on-ones every individual on the team. This is where I was really honest and open, asking, tell me about your workload, the tasks that you have on your plate, so I could confirm what I had evaluated in my workload review. I wanted to know where they saw opportunities to improve, where they could step in or felt that they could carry some additional load. And the biggest question I asked was, where did they want to spend their time growing within the company? Were there tasks or areas where they wanted experience or an opportunity to move into? And I did that with each individual team member. And I didn't make any promises or we didn't come up with a plan or action items out of that. I just collected the information. After I met with everyone, move number four was my plan. I took everything that I had on the table and started to think about how it could all come together, how we could support each other, who could take on what, how we could make some shifts and reprioritizations, and where people's opportunities for growth lied, and how we could leverage this to give them some experience in areas that they might not otherwise have that they were really interested in learning. Didn't always align, it's not always perfect, and some things just didn't match up. That was okay. The next thing that I did was meet with each of them individually again to walk through my take, my plan, and get their feedback and thoughts. Were we aligned? Did I miss anything? Did they have any questions? Are we good? And that's where we made a commitment and came up with action items. Pretty much everyone was on board. We had some conversations and had to make last-minute switches, but overall, it was pretty steady because I had taken the time first to do the workload review and then met with each of them to validate that information and get any additional insights. Step six was back briefing. This is where 24 hours later, I had each of them send me an email with what they had understood about our conversation, what their commitments were, what their next steps were going to be, so that I could verify they understood it and everyone was clear. It was a really simple email. I gave them the structure that I was looking for, and that helped ensure that everyone committed, knew exactly what was expected of them, and gave me a lot of confidence in the team moving forward. And the final step, step 7, was our weekly rhythm. I met with each individual team member for 15 to 30 minutes every week, which I was already doing, but there was a little bit more intention here in these meetings. Previously, they had been more, let's have a coffee chat, see how things are going, how can I help? This was more of an evaluation of how are you feeling in these new tasks? How's your workload? What are things like for you at home? Are you balancing it all? To make sure that I hadn't missed anything, and we could continue to improve as we moved on. The other thing we did was we became a little bit more intentional with our team meetings. I had everyone share their new learnings and lessons from the work they were taking on, or the shifts they had made, where they say opportunities for improvement, things I might have been missing as well, and what we were learning from this whole process. That got us through those six weeks pretty seamlessly. Now, of course, like any business, there were bumps and things that came up. But because we had done the hard work of meeting, validating, committing, and continuing to ask good questions and stay aligned, we were able to work through all of that pretty seamlessly. And even after my boot came off, we were running like a well-oiled machine, and I got to spend more time doing the things I should have been doing as a leader and less time in the nitty gritty. That allowed us to actually set up new team members for success, help team members who've been with us for a long time, do more of the things they wanted to do and grow, and start working on career paths and progressions that we hadn't been really intentional about in a small company. Now, I came out of that with a new understanding of the leader's role. The leader's job is to set the conditions for the team to operate, to hand them the context that they need, ask them what they need to grow and support them in that growth, and keep showing up intentionally with curiosity into the conversations that keep the work moving forward and the people aligned and collaborating. Fast forward, I was building a business unit inside a global company, and the pace was 60-hour weeks. I had teams across multiple time zones. I was traveling every month, and I had client relationships that I was holding personally. There was a list of decisions and work that went directly through me before they could reach the people doing the work. And I was producing growth, real fast growth, but it was a pace that I couldn't hold personally. And the thing that I didn't notice at first was that I had taken that muscle that I had built through deployments, and I had pointed at the wrong target. Surviving as the load bearer had become my default, again. And that default was building a business unit that couldn't run without me. That recognition was the moment I started building LoyaltyOps differently. Here's what I'm focused on now, which is pretty different from before. I work out every morning. I meditate daily. I delegate. I treat relationships as the center of how I operate, which is still the same, but I just tackle it differently. I'm not the gatekeeper and the mover and the creator of things. I'm a steward of these relationships. We scope engagements tightly around what's actually needed for the client based off of a true diagnosis and what our team can truly deliver and is within our scope. We treat clients like the humans they are first. And we grow at a pace that allows us to keep showing up at our best. Now, my team works the same way. They show up mostly rested. They have their own personal priorities and wellness practices that they're focused on. They carry the load that belongs to them and know which decisions they own and which they don't. They know their daily behavioral expectations and how we do work here, what our standards are. And they bring their best self to work. And the work is better because of it. And what I mean by building for sustainability is it's the pace that honors people. The growth follows naturally. Now, here's the thing that I didn't know and learned the hard way across my career.